William Paul Thomas: Disrupting Homogeny

“Study for the Curious Case of the Articulate Academic” by William Paul Thomas

In this interminable political moment, when violent bureaucracies are processing people on the basis of their identities, artists are turning to portraiture as a means of resistance. A picture makes a person visible even if policy denies their humanity. And if you can see them, you have to deal with them as an individual with a life like yours, not a representation of an identity category you’ve marginalized as some dangerous other. For some portrait artists, formal concerns drop away from the existential fact of their subject matter. The work is more about the person pictured than how the artist presents them. But William Paul Thomas’s portraits of black men are different. Faces are rendered with wonderful realism, but they float against a single-color field, disconnected from body and place. The space within the painting is not a real space; it’s a political space, which is abstract. Thomas explains identity politics as real people trapped within an abstraction. You see the stakes, for his subjects, of simply existing. Thomas is a recent resident artist at the Durham Art Guild’s Golden Belt Artist Studios and Power Plant Gallery, and a current resident at Duke’s Rubenstein Arts Center. After this opening reception at 21c Museum Hotel’s Vault Gallery (with craft cocktails inspired by the work), Disrupting Homogeny runs through the summer. —Chris Vitiello